I know the board has some fiduciary duty, but can a company put some guardrails on it when they go public, like saying the environment will always come first, or employees or customers or something?
I know the board has some fiduciary duty, but can a company put some guardrails on it when they go public, like saying the environment will always come first, or employees or customers or something?
Also if the shareholders vote for policy X, the company cannot work against policy X or ignore policy X.
If your shareholders all get together and vote for some policy or program that will DEFINITELY hurt the stock value… well, the company still has to do it because it obeys the shareholders. And it has to try and do it the best possible way – malicious compliance/bad faith can also potentially get you in trouble.
But since the majority shareholders in, frankly, most meaningful public companies are the likes of hedge funds, then the majority of votes are always going to be to do the thing that boosts share value. This inhuman corporate concepts simply cannot care about anything other than more dollars. On the rare occasion where they may try, it gets labeled as ESG wokism and they get threatened legally by conservative governors (at least in the US).
The real problem with shareholder capitalism may be the terrible influence of hedge funds and professional investors rather than the fundamental principle of the investor-based system. But the hedge fund and professional investor is also a kind of natural consequence of these systems.
This isn’t really true. And is actually exactly what the law is meant to protect. The 51% owner isn’t allowed to purposely tank the company and screw over the other 49% just because they vote.